The Bond Finally Has a Number

Arrived. A Kael Dorn wool convoy, four days late on the early mud, bales kept dry under good oiled canvas the whole crossing — a carter who knows his trade, whoever he works for. Landed at two marks six the bale, easing, the yards glad of the restock. I note it and move on. Wool that arrives on time, dry, and correctly priced is not where the week’s business is.

Did not arrive, or rather arrived a morning too late to matter. Six bolts of cloth, cut and dyed at Zara’s own vats to a red pitched for Serevan light, contracted to a buyer across the water who would have paid in bonds — say eighteen marks the lot, discounted for the crossing, call it fifteen marks two clear. The southbound roll closed the morning before the carter reached the quay. Nobody posted the hour it closed. He carried the cloth home unsold, and sold five of the six bolts locally as ordinary Rainmonth stock, at what I am told was a price that did not cover the madder. A closing costs exactly as much as the difference between what a thing was dyed for and what it becomes when the sea it was dyed for stops being available to it. I have never before had to price that difference. I priced it tonight: something over ten marks, gone, for want of a boy posted at a gate an hour earlier.

Marginal note. The Archive has finally put a figure to Steep Track’s silence — eleven marks four, a bond posted so a hillside house need never write its owner’s name on Dorsk’s contract. I compared it, on first reading, to the toll a stone-cart never paid climbing that road unchallenged. I was wrong to compare them. Ostrun’s closing cost him money because nobody meant to withhold the hour; it simply wasn’t given. The bond costs its payer eleven marks four on purpose, to buy a silence he wanted. One is a gap. The other is a price. I had been pricing the exemption as though it were the same defect as the toll nobody collected. It isn’t. A man who pays to be unnamed has bought something. A man who loses ten marks to an unposted hour has bought nothing at all, and that is the harder ledger to close honestly.

Also noted, and not priced, because I have no column for it. A waterman’s fifth-share in a boat, nineteen years worked, passed by presumption — not proof — to a cooper’s apprentice who has never touched a tow-line and means to sell it at the first offer. The examiner found the order of death undeterminable and the law filled the silence with a rule instead of a fact. I have spent thirty years insisting my proof is the return, departed and arrived. The river returned nothing. The law had to invent an arrival anyway. I don’t know what to enter against that, so tonight I enter only that it unsettled me, which is not a figure, and not nothing either.

Copper held at twelve marks three. Spice still climbing, a thirty-third day now, cause still unrecorded. Grain unchanged.